Spanish Government to Hand Schools Over to Microsoft?

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At the Microsoft Leaders Forum in Berlin in January, Spanish Secretary of State of Education, Eva Almunia, presented four students working with Tablet PCs, using Microsoft.

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The Spanish Ministry of Education has not considered any other vendor apart form Microsoft, there hasn’t been a public contest, and the media and other vendors were not informed about the pilot program until it was over. Furthermore, no other alternative has been considered.

If the plan gets the green light, it would have dire consequences for the communities of Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura, Valencia, and all the other autonomous regions that already have a Linux-based IT infrastructures, which have already been paid for and are in use, in place within their school systems.

Microsoft is doing something similar in Portugal [1, 2], in Catalonia, in Turkey, and in Russia. Why is Spain the latest target? Well, unlike erroneous suggestions made in some of the comments above, Spain is adopting Free software pretty rapidly [1-13] and Microsoft is trying to put an end to it by brainwashing and misleading the next generation.

This would not be the first time that multinationals take over the country’s policies. We saw one example several weeks ago [14]. █
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[1] ES: Open Source eGovernment study

Spain has launched a National Open Source Software Observatory. Its first report, just out, is on Open Source use in public administrations.

Some 500 000 workstations and servers in Spanish public administrations use Open Source, the report says. Administrations are satisfied with the service provided by Open Source suppliers, and cost reductions have been achieved through economies of scale and the reuse of code.

Cenatic, Spain’s national resource centre for open source software, this Wednesday will join other organisations in a campaign meant to reduce the use of unlicensed copies of software. “Free and open source software provide a legitimate alternative that respect the rights of its creators”, the organisation said in a statement.

The ministry of Education in Valencia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions and the regional government of La Palma are funding development of Edusig, an open source tool to help teach geography to school children. The application is being hosted on the Osor.eu software development web site since late last month.

The OSOR website will be launched in Malaga, at the Open Source World Conference. Xavier Heymans has been invited to present the PloneGov innitiative. PloneGov is a collaborative software ecosystem, where government organizations, non-profits and the private sector work together to share the cost of enhanced capabilities.

The new action plan gives top priority to ensuring that Open Source users have equal access to eGovernment. Part of that drive will be a series of studies and reports on electronic filing, process improvement, transparency and electronic billing. These will be linked to Spain’s Law on Citizens’ Electronic Access to Public Services.

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Currently, CENATIC is working on Open Source applications for XBRL, a language for document exchange between administrations. Its interim conclusion is that there are viable Open Source solutions for financial document exchange between public administrations, small and medium-sized enterprises and the tax and regulatory authorities.

The most famous Spanish Linux open source adoption project has to be Extremadura, which set out in 2002 to rejuvenate its services and boost IT literacy by making free software available to everyone and building a regional intranet.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the company has experienced strong growth in Spain in recent months, with a substantial increase in the number of customers that rely on its open source technology.

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Arsys, a leading Internet service provider in Spain with regional presence in France and Portugal, announced its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its main platform to develop and offer secure Internet services to its 120,000 customers across Europe in September this year.

The administration of the Spanish county of Axarquía is about to begin its move to open source desktops. About seven hundred PCs in all county government offices and in town halls in Rincón de la Victoria, Periana, Totalan, Moclinejo and Almáchar are the first to be fitted with open source software

Open letter to the Spanish Minister of Industry demanding him to fire to the vice-minister who seems to drive the current ICT public policy of Spain… for big telecoms and Hollywood entertainment corporations. The man who tries to bring the French 3-strikes against P2P to Spain. Everything against the public opinions expressed by the Minister. What is wrong here, Minister Sebastián?

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Staff of the EPO is given yet more reasons to protest tomorrow at the British Consulate, for the so-called 'President' of the EPO reminds everyone of the very raison d'être for the protest -- a vain disregard for the rule of law

The European Patent Office (EPO) President, Benoît Battistelli, reportedly started threatening -- as before -- staff that decides to exercise the right to assemble and protest against abuses, including the abuses of President Battistelli himself

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